I consider the purpose of human life, as it should be protected in our political institutions, to be the cultivation of personal virtue. Certainly, it was to obtain relief from religious oppression that a great many of our forebears came to America. Their intent was not to flee restraint, per se, but to substitute restraints chosen by themselves, for their own perfection, for those imposed by less benevolent governments.
The freedom to choose one’s one manner of virtue–whether it be some form of Protestantism, Deism, atheism, Judaism, Mormonism or something else–is one understanding of freedom. This freedom is consistent with freedom of action and freedom of speech. It leads naturally to freedom of business and economic life, since it implies both some work ethic, and honesty. It lends itself to decentralization, since if people do not abuse one another, they do not need to be protected from one another.
We can in fact posit that the degree of decentralization of government possible is a function of the capacity of individuals to govern themselves and their own passions. Some government will always be needed, since this is not and presumably never will be a world populated entirely by perfectly honest, perfectly rational people. Where this balance should lie is negotiable, and represents the part of the continuum I consider to be political moderation, in which difference of opinion on details are expected, and debate both productive and needed.
To this I contrast Leftism. This doctrine redefines freedom to mean freedom FROM differential moralities, and defines virtue precisely as conformity. Self evidently, the diversity of human genetic material will–absent coercive Huxleyan genetic tampering–always mean that people are different in their innate capacities, and hence likelihood of large scale success. Added to this, in the economic and social spheres, are the relative utilities and drawbacks of different ethical system.
For example, those who love pleasure rather than work will always be outpaced financially by those who value work over pleasure, in a just system. This is an inevitable consequence.
For this reason, absolute human equality is not an attainable goal, without violence.
And violence is of course what we see in the history of efforts to remake man in the image of an obedient happy drone, none of which have succeeded. The 40,000 killed in the French Revolution pale beside the “accomplishments” of the Chinese, Russians, Vietnamese (who killed 65,000 in 1975 alone), and of course Cambodians.
These are the two foundational forms of political life. Freedom FOR virtue, and freedom FROM virtue.